Talk:Hamlet (Play)
Alright, except for the actress playing Ophelia, none of the actors are identified by anything but the character they played. So, will it be enough to create articles for the character, and then explain their importance to the story, or do we want to create a Claudius article and then a "Actor Who Played Claudius" article. TR 04:41, 20 March 2009 (UTC) :That sounds cumbersome. Maybe "Actor Who Played Claudius" could read something like "An actor played the role of Claudius, the incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Claudius assassinated King Hamlet of Denmark, his older brother, and married Gertrude, the Queen of Denmark, and assumed the throne. He then became concerned that young Hamlet was becoming insane and plotted against the prince, whom he had designated as his heir. He succeeded in killing Hamlet by luring him into a duel with another character who stabbed him with a poisoned sword, but not before he himself was killed by Hamlet using the same poisonous blade. :"This actor did x y and z . . . " Turtle Fan 10:45, 20 March 2009 (UTC) ::So no articles for the Hamlet cast of characters then? I guess that makes sense. TR 20:55, 20 March 2009 (UTC) :::Actually I had reconsidered and was about to come around to your position. I'd rather call the articles "Hamlet" (a disambiguation is needed), "Claudius," "Gertrude" et cetera than "Actor Who Played Hamlet," "Actor Who Played Claudius," "Actor Who Played Gertrude" et cetera. And I've got some time to kill before I go out tonight and was actually about to create those very articles. Turtle Fan 00:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC) In WHGTY, Shakespeare, in bitching about what would be called a copyright infringement today, also bitches about the actor who gave the lines of Hamlet to a printer, but misremembered them so that the unauthorized copy was also incorrect. He had said the same thing in RB. I thought I knew my Shakespearean history, but I don't know the incident to which he refers. Turtle Fan 13:42, 21 March 2009 (UTC) :I had to do a little research. Evidentally the First Quarto was published in 1603, but went MIA until 1823. It is abridged, and actually there is debate about whether or not it was authorized or plagerized. There is some debate about whether it really was "butchered". I guess HT sides with the misremembered plagerized text theory. TR 23:44, 21 March 2009 (UTC) ::I remember my Shakespeare prof doing a brief side-by-side comparison of the Quarto and Folio versions of Hamlet. One discrepancy I remember is that one (I misremember which) described Fortinbras fighting with the pole-axe and the other has him fighting with the Polacks. I also remember he said that he favored splitting the difference between the two editions in coming up with a "canonical" version, and the text he'd given us did so. I don't remember whether he said anything further about the controversy you describe. ::If the Quarto dates to 1603 its allusion in RB is anachronistic. Of course, so is the existence of Hamlet at all. I suppose that if it were written earlier, it could have been plagiarized earlier. ::Sorry that you had to do research that I could have done just as easily myself. I was wondering if you knew of anything off the top of your head. Turtle Fan 03:43, 22 March 2009 (UTC)